


All Along the Watchtower

by TheLionInMyBed



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Conversations with Dead People, Gen, Ghosts, Should Really Have Been Finished In Time For Halloween, Third Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 10:56:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21298295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: In the eighty-third year of the reign of King Elessar, a salvage hunter pays a visit to Tol Himling. She finds more there than broken pots and ancient gold.
Comments: 48
Kudos: 165





	All Along the Watchtower

**Author's Note:**

> This story was commissioned by an extremely kind and generous soul who wished for something Maedhros-centric and to remain anonymous. Many thanks to them <3

Beleriand had slipped beneath the waves- but slipped was too kind a word. 

Beleriand had broken like a bone and time had not washed all the suppuration from the wound. What had once been the green heart of Ossiriand was splintered into jagged cliffs and stony islands jutting proud from a sucking sea. 

The beaches were black rock and lumps of glass polished by the sea as the Elves of old must once have polished their dishes and ewers. Bones washed ashore sometimes, twisted by the ocean, or by the will of the old evil that the gods had drowned with the old country. Lumps of rust that might once have been swords and chunks of stone with teeth frozen in them that Meldis said were dragons once. Even gold, if you were lucky. 

When it was winter enough the fish weren’t biting but not so winter that the storms would capsize her coracle, Hiril would row out to the islands. They hadn’t been picked quite as clean as the beaches had, and what was more, the biggest of them still had ruins on. When Hiril had been younger, she’d made a game of pacing ancient halls as the Elflords had, bare feet scuffing over time-cracked, fishnets dragging behind her like the gown of a great lady out of stories. 

She was too old for that now, but she came back every year all the same. It was a good place for salvage. 

It was a bad place for ghosts. 

At first, she’d been too young to fear the wraiths, or had too much to prove to let on that she did. But by the time she’d impressed Forhend enough for him to make an offer for her, she’d realised there was no harm in them.

“They can steal your soul clear out of you,” Larnach liked to say.

“It’s not the soul they steal,” Meleth would reply scornfully. “It’s your body they’ll walk away with. They slip right in like a thief making off with a coat.”

“I think an Elflord would choose to wear something a little finer than me,” Hiril always told them, weathered and salt-stained, thick about the middle and worn out from the four daughters she’d carried. 

The ghosts were worn out things themselves, just like their ruins, tall and gaunt, made up of shadow and suggestion. Sometimes they told stories, of old glories and ancient grudges, the bright splendour of a high king’s court and banners rippling over fields that bristled with more blades of steel than grass. Mostly, though, they spoke of holding watch upon a wall, of baking bread and braiding hair, and confused her with women whose bones had been long buried when the old country sank. 

“Hello,” she called to the spectres now, tying her boat to the rotten-tooth stump of a pillar and stepping onto soil. “How does the morning find you?”

There was no answer, only the sea slurping at the shore and a rippling in the dark. The shadows flapped like broken cobwebs as she strode through them, eddying about her ankles. Beneath her boots were mosaics, showing stars she did not know, the tiles still so bright she might have prised them up and sold them. She might yet, if the fishing was ever poor enough, but for now it pleased her to let them lie, cracked and weed-choked and beautiful. 

The shadows dogged her from room to ruined room, over fallen lintels and under the thin branches of the island’s salt-sick trees, as she picked over the debris of lives lived before her great great grandmother was a girl. She’d found unbroken pots before, long-necked and elegant, round as a babe and just as fragile. Those she wrapped in sackcloth and set them carefully in her boat, to sell to the merchants that passed through Auldstone on the road to the Havens. They paid good silver for them and though they likely made better gold from the elves, Hiril didn’t resent that. 

Today, she found shards of glass and pottery, and, under a piece of rotting wood, three tiny figures carved from lapis. Chipped and weather-blunted, but still plainly men astride tall horses - the tokens for a game? Hiril shrugged and stuffed them deep into a pocket. 

“Thief,” whispered the shadows, and the warmth that Hiril had felt growing in her chest at the thought of the coin the figures might bring was snuffed to cinders. 

“I’m sorry, Master Elf,” she asked. “Or is it ‘Mistress’? Either way, it has been long and long since you laid claim to these, and it would be kind of you to spare them.”

Darkness curdled like rotten milk, clotting into bone and sinew and a ragged flag of hair as the ghost stepped into being. It burned with a pale flame that charred away its flesh as a log collapsed to cinders in the hearth, and yet it was not consumed. This one had died badly, then, a long, long time ago. 

“You are not the first Man to disturb our watch,” it told her. “But the first not clad in bones and midnight silk for quite some time. What brings you to keep company with the dead?”

It was a relief that it said ‘dead’ - they did not always know it, and Hiril was never sure if she should tell them. “A house full of children, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and two sets of grandparents. The company of the dead is a relief,” she said, surreptitiously turning over more rubble. 

The ghost smiled. Its mouth did not move, but the flesh guttered like a candle in the wind to show the teeth beneath its lips. “I remember…” 

What it remembered, it did not say. They were like that, the wraiths. Easily lost in reminiscence, being only memories themselves. 

“What was this place?” she asked, to remind it that she was there. Ghosts were much given to lamentation and little to specifics; some had died before the castle was built, some spoke of buttresses and crenelations but not the fear that had seen them erected, and some would only weep for what was lost.

“Are the memories of Men so short?” said this wraith wryly. 

Hiril gestured to her ancient seal skin cloak and the salt-bleached wool beneath. “Do I look like a loremaster to you?”

“No more than a necromancer, but fair forms can deceive.”

“Fair forms and fell? You’re very friendly for a wraith.” It _ had _ been fair once, under the memories of wounds, she thought. But that told her little; all elves were. 

“The form is fair, in that it was fairly won,” it said, smiling its ghastly shadow of a smile again. “What year is this?”

The coasts of Forlindon were not so cut off from the world that they did not know that, but she hesitated before offering the answer. “The eighty-third year of the reign of King Elessar.” 

“Elessar.” Ghosts did not speak so much as drop meaning, fully formed, into your head, but there was an edge of puzzlement to its echo. “Elf named - has our cousin taken a liking to him?”

“Well, he took an elf to be his queen,” said Hiril, with no idea as to the cousin it meant. “They say she’s lovely as - As twilight.” Hiril thought she remembered from a song. 

“Tinúviel?” Skin ebbed like the sea at low tide, exposing jutting reefs of bone and the black memory of blood pattered to the tiles. Its feet were silent, passing harmless through the waving tufts of seagrass even as its pacing grew more fretful.“That is not- then the siege is broken? No, the leaguer holds, does it not? _ Does it not _?” 

“Yes,” Hiril agreed, to calm it, for it was flickering like a candle in the draft. “It holds.” It never made sense to her what the dead could understand, how they could both know themselves to be dead but not grasp that the battle they’d died in was long done. Correcting them was no more use than correcting Forhend’s grandmother when she mistook him for his father.

“Yes,” the ghost agreed, relaxing, its flesh healing smooth and whole. “Of course it does. The High King reigns in Hithlum, and all is not lost yet. But why are you here? Who are you?”

“A thief, you said.” She might not fear the dead, but Hiril knew better than to give her name so lightly. She wanted to ask if it had known Haleth, or Bëor and Modthryth the Wolf, the great warriors of the days before the breaking of the world, but she feared upsetting it again. “And what should I call you?” 

“An oathbreaker.” 

“And what was this?”

“Call it a watchtower,” said the ghost distractedly, though Hiril had walked the island round and round, and the space within the crumbling walls was bigger than Auldstone twice over. 

“What are you doing here?”

“Keeping watch,” it said and turned its ruined face towards the North. 

Hiril squinted into the growing dusk. “Against what? The dark lord is fallen and even if there weren’t, there’s nothing to watch for out here but mackerel.” 

“He is not fallen. He waits, testing our strength, testing our vigilance. Enjoy the peace, daughter of the Edain; it may last all your life and all your grandchildren’s lives. But it will not last forever.”

“Well, I suppose we’re grateful,” she said because it seemed rude to point out to it that it was dead and even if the dark lord wasn’t as cast down as the songs made out, there was little it could do about it. “Did you fight in the great battles? Was it a dragon that burned you so?”

“Burned?” The ghost raised a hand that wasn’t there to the half-melted circlet upon its brow, the ruined flesh of its face, and then its attention strayed to the north again. “They came down from the mountains. Sudden Flame, the bards called it. But that was not- What year is this?”

“Don’t you remember?”

As dusk drew long, charcoal shadows across the ruins, the ghost was the brightest thing in the world. The ghost and the night’s first star, which sat low in the West, above the blue-black sea. 

“It matters not,” the ghost told her, suddenly. “Take your tokens, thief, and take what joy from them you can.”

“I leave you to your watch, Master Elf. I hope it ends soon.”

“Not until the breaking of the world.”

“Well. That happened. After a fashion.”

The ghost looked about, at the ruined walls and the white-capped surf that lay beyond them. “Mackerel,” it echoed, and she wondered if that would make the impression that the weight of years hadn’t. 

Hiril did not stay to find out. She left it looking north, dusk drawing in and the evening star sat bright above its head, and picked her way down to where her boat was moored, the watchtower’s ancient treasures heavy in her pockets.

It might be there, the next time she came to the island - some were as unchanging as the ruins themselves - or it might wander away to other haunts, or might yet cross the ocean, which Meldis said that all elves passed over in the end. 

The wind goaded the sea into choppy waves as she guided her boat back towards home. The water was black, silvered by cool moonlight, and Hiril knew that if the swell grew strong enough to suck her boat and her both beneath the water, it would be the _ end _ of her. 

There was a queer, cold comfort in the thought. 


End file.
